


An Insatiable Appetite for Glory

by matchsticks_p (matchsticks)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon Divergence, Complete, Dark, Gen, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Trigger warnings for everything, Unhealthy Relationships, forced to cohabitate, please heed the warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-19 23:22:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3628098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years ago, Jim Moriarty married Sebastian Moran before he shipped out to Afghanistan, because he needed to use the good Moran name. Sebastian never heard from him again before receiving notice of his death two years later. </p><p>Therefore, it's no small shock to see Moriarty at the foot of his hospital bed when he wakes up from the horrors of war.</p><p>(Detailed warnings at the beginning of each chapter.)<br/>Chapter one: Jim Moriarty puts a man together<br/>Chapter two: Sebastian Moran earns his keep<br/>Final chapter: The problem of Sherlock Holmes remains</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Extraction

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings specific to chapter one: war imagery, traumatic injuries, PTSD, descriptions of surgical procedures, self-inflicted injuries, d/s dynamics

Sebastian wakes up to the sight of the devil's smile on a dead man's face.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Jim Moriarty says.

Funny. That's not what Sebastian was expecting him to say.

* * *

_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and that was all the warning they got before the world was all noise, all heat, all shockwaves and no gravity. The pain didn't set in until long after he landed, half on his side and half on his stomach, everything below his waist burning with an unnameable pain._

_Two of his men were wailing._

_There were two gunshots, and a moment of pure perfect clarity._

_And then horrified yells. A third gunshot._

_And then the darkness seeping in._  
  
* * *

"The approval for your medical discharge was fast-tracked," Jim says as he busies himself spooning ice into a little paper cup, "but you already knew that was likely to happen, didn't you? As of an hour ago, you've been invalided out, into your husband's loving care."

Sebastian throat feels dryer than a sponge left out in the desert sun, and he waits for Jim to put a few ice chips between his cracked lips before he tries to reply. The meltwater seeps down his throat in a thin, cold trickle. It doesn't feel like enough. "You're supposed to be dead," he croaks out. God, he could do with an entire pitcher of water poured straight down his gullet.

"No, my dear, that's you. Almost thought you were a goner for a moment. The blood transfusion saved you," Jim says. His lips are fixed in a strange grin that Sebastian doesn't remember having seen on him before, but then again, it had been a very long time ago. 

The pounding in his head is making it difficult to remember much of anything from back then, or indeed from any time at all. The burning pain in his left thigh still hasn't gone away. It's been there since—since—

"Go back to sleep," Jim murmurs. "We'll be moving you home while you're out."

His voice is some approximation of gentle, but Sebastian still responds to it as automatically as he does to his commanding officer's barked instructions. He obeys.

* * *

Three years ago, just before he was to going ship out to Afghanistan, Sebastian had met Jim in a bar.

It wasn't the type of bar that the average soldier about to head off to war tended to frequent. There was no music, no dancing, no cheerily willing girls eager to do their part for Queen and country and send a brave fellow off with a nice memory to keep him warm on lonely nights. Just a quiet hum of expensive men and women discussing undoubtedly important business at a discreet volume, over outrageously priced cocktails. A posh place. One last taste of everything Sebastian hated, so he wouldn't forget what he was leaving behind.

Jim had openly watched him from across the bar all night. He'd been drinking something bright red in a highball glass, smiling whenever Sebastian met his eye. Short, gelled back hair, crisp suit immaculate. He'd waited until last call before he made his way over to introduce himself.

Sebastian had stayed all night hoping he would.

He'd allowed himself to be seduced because he figured he might die in Kandahar. And that was what he'd been looking for anyway, wasn't it? A chance to die, a way out. Jim was supposed to be his one last hurrah before he bravely threw himself into the flames of imperialistic expansion, a good little peer of the realm unto the end.

Jim had proven himself to be a bit more than a hurrah. He was insatiable, always up for it, barely allowed Sebastian to leave his flat for a week straight. He almost thought he'd die on British soil after all, right there in his own bedroom, from being drained of every fluid his body had to offer. Jim took him apart and never, ever put him back together again. And he had enjoyed every second of it.

He'd stopped counting after the third night, but by a conservative estimate Sebastian would guess that he had spent about 40% of the week with some part of Jim inside his mouth. 

They came up for air eventually, and Sebastian popped to the shops to get some badly needed bread and Red Bull. And condoms.

When he'd gotten back home, Jim had been sitting at his kitchen table, looking serious. The incongruity of the image had made him bite back a smile. Jim was completely naked but for his socks, black merino wool striped with thin grey lines, hair beyond all hope of dignity from all the ways Sebastian had grabbed fistfuls of it, and yet he was still sitting with perfect posture, his face solemn.

"What?" Sebastian had asked uneasily.

Jim had been completely upfront, no tricks, no lies. He needed Sebastian's last name. "A civil partnership," he'd clarified, when Sebastian looked blank. "Spousal privileges. Your peerage."

And Sebastian had, while hating himself, patiently explained to him that same-sex civil partnerships do not extend title and privilege to the spouse in the same ways as opposite-sex marriages. 

Jim's lips had quirked. "You didn't ask me why. Or say no."

Sebastian hadn't even noticed those two options existed until Jim had pointed them out. "Alright then, why?"

"It doesn't matter," he'd said next, and Sebastian had thought he was jerking him around in circular non-answers until he realized he was actually replying to what he'd said before, about privileges. "It's more of a formality, to help me get into a private club. I'm not trying to get in to the House of Lords. It's for a little scam I'm running, you see." And Jim had shown him all his sharp teeth then, but it wasn't what Sebastian would call a smile.

Sebastian had been enthralled, by both his easy charm and the cavalier way he talked about everything. As if marriage was just another meaningless tool, no sentimentality attached. As if scamming people was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Sebastian hadn't been surprised to learn that Jim was some sort of con artist, though—that kind of charisma would be wasted on a normal job.

He had wanted a way to really, truly, spectacularly annoy his father before he left the country, and Jim's proposal seemed like just the ticket. He justified it to himself by rationalising that he could afford the lawyers to petition for an annulment if it turned out to be a terrible idea later on, and so long as he didn't sign over any of his assets Jim couldn't do much damage that he couldn't fix with more money and more lawyers. 

But really.

If he had to be completely honest with himself, he'd admit that even if none of that were true, he would've still said yes. Because Jim exuded something that made him want to say yes, to everything, whatever he asked, and afterwards Jim had rewarded him by holding him down in the bathtub and riding him, shower running and Sebastian's back blocking the drain enough that he'd nearly drowned more than once. Sputtering, spitting water, neck sore from keeping his head lifted so he didn't slip beneath the surface again, cock clenched inside Jim, elbows bruised from knocking against the tub, and the one memory Sebastian would hold dear was the moment Jim stroked a wet hand over Sebastian's face, sliding his eyelids closed and whispering, "I knew you would be a good boy for me." 

They'd gone to the register office the next day and filed the proper documents. 

The day after that, Sebastian went off to war quite cheerfully, all things considered. 

He'd never heard from Jim again. He didn't even write once, not even to say whether the scam involving the good Moran name had been successful. The months passed, and he did nothing unseemly to Sebastian's family name that he ever heard about. Quite frankly, the day-to-day grind of his military duties meant that he'd nearly forgotten about Jim when he received notice of his death one day. Widower to a man he'd never really known.

* * *

The next time Sebastian wakes up, it's in a plush bed, dark blue sheets far softer than anything a hospital would own. There's a window with the blinds closed, weak sunlight creeping around the edges slowly fading. The room is neat and orderly, but with an underlying opulence. It's only neat because it's largely empty—everything in the room is of far higher quality than anything Sebastian would've chosen for himself. It uneasily reminds him both of being in the barracks and of being young, shifting between the two with a feverish dizziness. 

The next time Sebastian wakes up, his leg is paining him acutely, deep inside, where he knows now with clear shocking clarity exactly where his bones are. His hip hurts too, sharper, where they had cut the skin open. The surgeons had inserted a long drill bit into the opening, tunnelled through the marrow of his thighbone to create a long, long canal, and then stuck a titanium rod into that hole. The rod keeps his broken femur together. They had nailed it there to keep it in place, because the last thing one wants is a metal rod jiggling loose inside, bobbing around skewering all of the soft meat with reckless abandon. No, it's safely screwed into the bone at both ends to keep everything where it should stay. 

The next time Sebastian wakes up, he's thirsty. There's glass of water on the bedside table. It's heavy, made of cut crystal. He's thankful for the straw stuck in it because he's not sure he can raise it all the way to his mouth. He's annoyed by the shaking in his hands, by how many days he fuzzily counts he's losing to sleep. The painkillers keep the ache in his leg almost bearable, but he's not sure it's worth the constant feeling of being not quite awake. 

The next few times Sebastian wakes up, he's told to go back to sleep. It's always more sleep. More rest. Don't move. Just heal. Sleep.

The next time Sebastian wakes up, Jim is holding his injured leg by the ankle and raising it gently to a forty-five degree angle.

"What—" Sebastian coughs to clear his throat. Jim obligingly fetches him some water. "What are you doing?" he asks again, after a few sips. Same glass as before. Different coloured straw this time.

"Keeping your leg in motion, as per the doctor's orders, my darling husband," Jim says innocently. 

"Why?"

"To ensure a speedy recovery, of course. We can't allow your joints and muscles to wither away to mere husks while you're laid up, can we?"

"No, but why are you doing it? Why are you here? Why am I here? Where am I?"

"Back in dear old London, my brave soldier," Jim replies sweetly. 

It does not escape Sebastian's notice that Jim has only answered the last question. It also doesn't escape Sebastian's notice that Jim is being fucking creepy.

Jim, still holding Sebastian's leg, bends it at the knee and pushes forward slowly, steadily. "Does this hurt?" He sounds more curious than concerned.

"No more than usual." It always hurts.

"Good," he murmurs. He pushes until Sebastian's knee skims over his chest, just touching. "You always were flexible," he says with satisfaction.

* * *

_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and that was all the warning they got before the world was all noise, all heat, all shockwaves and no gravity. IED, buried too well for them to see before it was too late, the explosion underneath and to the side of their vehicle so that it flipped them completely over._

_The pain didn't set in until long after he landed, half on his side and half on his stomach, everything below his waist burning with an unnameable pain._

_Two of his men were wailing. There was no way they would survive. Their entrails painted the sand scarlet and even if they could put them back, they'd never be able to tell which bits were whose or untangle them from each other._

_Two gunshots, and a moment of pure perfect clarity._

_And then horrified yells. A third gunshot._

_And then the darkness seeping in._  
  
* * *

A pattern builds itself around Sebastian over his next few weeks of recovery. As the dosage of his painkillers goes down, his alertness comes back to him in inverse proportion. He stays awake for longer and longer periods, is capable of stringing together more conscious thoughts, starts truly taking in the information surrounding him.

Jim usually comes to help him clean and relieve himself at least three times a day. He also helps move his broken leg around during each visit, keeping his knee supple, making Sebastian work whatever muscles he can by trying to kick against the resistance of his hands. It's frustrating for Sebastian to see how weak his leg is, like it's a thing not attached to him. Jim is a tiny slip of a man compared to him, but he holds the sole of Sebastian's foot with perfect ease, no trace of exertion in his voice as he goads him with insults. It makes Sebastian want to kick his teeth into his brains. His thigh flexes, shakes with how hard he tries to bury his foot into Jim's face. It makes Jim smile.

Sometimes Jim isn't there, for hours or even days at a time. The explanation is always some variation of "I've got work to do." He never says what, never elaborates. Sebastian has not forgotten how they met, and so he always assumes this work is something illegal.

When Jim isn't there, he sends a carer to check on Sebastian, to feed him and bathe him and exercise his leg until the only thing keeping him from begging for a rest is how hard he's gritting his teeth. They're all brutally professional and efficient, these carers. They don't make small talk and they don't answer when Sebastian asks their names. He never sees the same one more than twice before he or she disappears.

Jim has a doctor come in once, someone with the same brusque manner as all the carers. He checks out Sebastian from head to toe, pronounces him hearty and healthy and healing quite nicely. Sebastian had been a perfect specimen of fitness before the incident, and so it's no surprise that his recuperation is going along without complications. The doctor clears him to start bearing some weight on his left leg, with the aid of a crutch.

Jim thanks the doctor, and Sebastian never sees him again. 

The crutch gives him a chance to get out of the bedroom and adjoining bathroom for the first time since he started living here, if his strange, suspended existence can be considered living. He still has no idea why he's here, why Jim has decided to take him in, _why Jim is alive_. Walking around for the first time, he finds that he's been living in a townhouse with two other rooms besides his own on the top floor, doors closed, and a living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. Everything is clean and uncluttered in the same way his bedroom is, like a restrained surface covering up a throbbing decadence underneath. Everything is sparse, but expensive. There is no dust on any surface he can see. It's impossible to tell if the place belongs to Jim, if he's lived here for very long, or if it's just some place he now hangs around just to make sure Sebastian doesn't crack open his head should he fall while hobbling down the stairs.

He can see Hampstead Heath out the main living room window, though, which is fitting of his impression of Jim. Charismatic conman, a bit flash, likes to show off, but incredibly shrewd and had probably already made himself rich even before he gained access to the Moran fortune. It would be just like him to be living in plain sight in the Primrose area, embodying the clichés he ironically hides under.

It's a thing he's noticed now that his brain is finally working at near-normal speeds again, the last of the drugs working their way out of his system. On the days that Jim has got work to do, he flits in and out of roles, disguises, taking on personalities that Sebastian sometimes vaguely recognises as being from classic confidence scams. The Spanish Prisoner, the grandchild abroad, the one-eyed man, the casting agent, the wedding planner—and once, uncomfortably, a honeypot.

It's uncomfortable because Sebastian recognises too many facets of that particular disguise from the time before. The time they first met.

He doesn't know why it bothers him to think that Jim might have conned him when he knows full well that Jim is a conman, knew it the day he married him and didn't give a fuck then. It drives him slightly mad when he begins to mull over all that he knows about Jim and try to pick out the facts from fiction, winding his thoughts up into ever more labyrinthine circles, wondering if Primrose Hill is in fact so fitting for Jim after all, or if it's just in-character for yet another faux persona, and how would he even be able to tell the difference, and what _is_ the nature of authenticity anyway, what does it mean and how could it exist if the whole world is just the filtered remains of his perception? 

To prevent himself from going fully crazy, Sebastian tells himself that everything will become much more apparent and much less confusing once he's back to full health. He should just stop thinking about it for now, because there's no point. 

He's always been good at turning off parts of his mind, compartmentalizing things for later. It's what made him a first-rate sniper. 

Even though he's mobile now, relatively speaking, Jim still has to help him clean himself until he's cleared to stand with his full weight on his broken leg, since crutches and showers make for an unsavoury combination. It makes his palms prick and itch to submit to Jim's weirdly intimate ministrations, sloughing rough washcloths over his soap-slippery skin until it turns pink and warm. Jim does even the most personal of body parts without hesitance. Sebastian would almost liken it to a health professional's clinical indifference, if it weren't for the fact that Jim is pretty much always erect when he does it.

"See something you like?" Jim asks, amused voice a low rumble in his throat as he wipes up the insides of Sebastian's thighs. 

Sebastian flits his eyes away from Jim's crotch and says nothing. He's naked, sat atop the toilet with the lid flipped down. Jim is fully dressed, clothes spotless down to the gleaming black leather of his shoes. 

Jim stands slowly up, one hand pushing against Sebastian's right knee for balance, trailing it up Sebastian's chest to his shoulder as he towers over him. "Look at me," he commands.

He didn't specify where, and so Sebastian looks carefully at Jim's chest. The translucent white buttons of his shirt glow under the bathroom's harsh light.

Jim's wet fingers trace their way to Sebastian's chin, tipping his face up. Sebastian's eyes skitter to the ceiling, holding his head stiffly, blinking, like a dog uncomfortable with eye contact and trying to avoid a fight. Jim grips his jaw and turns his head inexorably, waits patiently for Sebastian to give in. 

The pupils of Jim's eyes swallow up all colour. He smiles when Sebastian stops trying to look away. "Good boy," he says, and Sebastian is thrown into disorientation for a moment. By the time he's done shivering, Jim has let him go.

The next time Jim cleans him, knelt at his feet and scrubbing efficiently between his toes, Sebastian can't help but ask, "Why?"

"Why what, poppet?" Jim answers indulgently. Sebastian's feet are never particularly dirty, since he hasn't made it outside yet, but Jim does everything with a certain fastidiousness. 

"This is beneath you," he says, meaning Jim at his feet but not meaning to have said that out loud. "I mean, why are you doing this? Taking care of me? Letting me live with you?" 

"Husbandly duties, of course. It would be despicable to abandon you in your time of need."

"We both know it was just a marriage of convenience. You got what you needed, and I never expected anything in return. You don't have to do this."

"Maybe I like having you helpless and dependent on my care," he says, just as breezy and glib as his previous answer. "Maybe this is a _Misery_ situation and I'm going to get you addicted to codeine and keep you as my pet prisoner forever."

Sebastian can't tell how much of this is a joke. Truthfully, he can't tell whether he finds it an unpleasant idea.

* * *  
_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and that was all the warning they got before the world was all noise, all heat, all shockwaves and no gravity. IED, buried too well for them to see before it was too late, the explosion underneath and to the side of their vehicle so that it flipped them completely over._

_The pain didn't set in until long after he landed, half on his side and half on his stomach, everything below his waist burning with an unnameable pain._

_Two of his men were wailing. There was no way they would survive. Their entrails painted the sand scarlet and even if they could put them back, they'd never be able to tell which bits were whose or untangle them from each other._

_Two gunshots, and a moment of pure perfect clarity._

_And then horrified yells. A third gunshot._

_Long after the darkness finally cleared, he told his Unit Welfare Officer about the demons that crept into his men through the fire, camouflaged, wisps of war itself with fingers like long tendrils of flame, entering their eyes, their ears, their noses, exiting through the new holes in their bodies, shrieking with delight and heading for the last remaining soldier. He'd had to stop them, even though he knew there was no way to stop them, not truly. He was simply delaying them, a brief interlude in their mission to climb into every last one of them all. He took out the last viable host, a mercy really._

_He stuck to this story, repeated it the same way every time, like a mantra._  
  
* * *

Sebastian's first trips out of the house are supervised visits to a private rehabilitation facility, where physiotherapists with the same familiar clinical efficiency put him through optimized routines on various exercise machines. They're as silent as the carers who used to come around the house, as brisk as all the doctors Sebastian only sees once. Jim dismisses them once Sebastian has learned how to use all of the equipment and takes over their job of spotting him himself. 

His femur continues to heal nicely, the smudgy bruises along his thigh no longer as dark as they were months ago, the leg starting to gain some muscle. His other wounds—superficial lacerations on his face, his hip, deep pink scar tissue snaking up the insides of his wrists—have healed long before. He's barely thought about them, his broken leg eclipsing everything else in his bodily consciousness. If Jim didn't have such a habit of stroking his thumbs absent-mindedly along his wrists, Sebastian probably wouldn't even remember those injuries at all.

Well, "absent-mindedly." What he really means by that Jim deliberate projects the air of absent-mindedness. Sebastian doubts Jim's mind could truly absent itself even if he tried. 

Jim puts him through his paces, does not let him quit before he's completed all of his required exercises even when the hot sweat of exertion and the cold sweat of pain mingle in his eyes. Something about the forced training reminds him bittersweetly of his early days in the military, when he was happy just to be away, to not have to think. But no drill instructor ever looked at him the way Jim does when he's in the peak of his suffering. They would've been indicted for harassment if they had. Jim's eyes flay strips off him in his most exquisite moments of pain, like he's peeling away his clothes and his skin and liking what he finds beneath. 

Sebastian always sleeps incredibly, incredibly well after a physio day.

He wakes up, once, to the sight of Jim with blood streaked across the front of his designer shirt, speckling the skin of his neck, under his chin. It triggers an automatic reaction in Sebastian, making him shoot out of his bed and cross the room before the dull throbbing of his thigh reminds him he shouldn't be walking around without his crutch. He ignores it and hovers his hands over Jim's shoulders, wanting to clutch at him and bodily examine the damage but afraid to actually make contact. It's a lot of blood. 

"Don't be dramatic," Jim says snappishly, which is rich because he fucking loves dramatics. He takes Sebastian's hands and leads him to a chair. He pushes him down into it without any pretence of gentleness.

"We need to get you to a doctor."

"It's obviously not my blood. Look at the spray pattern."

And he's right, of course. Now that the last of Sebastian's drowsy alarm has cleared away, it's obvious that all of Jim's clothes are intact, that the blood came from the outside. Still. "Where's it from?"

"Work," Jim says simply. 

"Something go wrong?"

"Oh no, my dear. Something went very, very right," he replies. He rubs a lazy hand over the half-dried blood on his chin, smudging and flaking it. It isn't a fashion accessory everyone can pull off, but he wears crimson well.

Sebastian blames the next thing he says on how good Jim looks covered in blood. He can't be held responsible for what he blurts out in the face of something so enjoyably distracting. "You didn't need to pretend, back then."

Jim's eyes sharpen, like a kestrel bringing some faraway prey into focus. He tilts his head minutely. "Elaborate."

He's gone too far to turn back now, so Sebastian presses on. "Back when we first met, that night. You didn't need to put on that act for me. I would've married you even without it. I quite like you the way you are right now."

Jim smiles then, an awful thing that crawls slowly across his face, and Sebastian can't remember why he ever worried about being unable to ever tell the real Jim apart from the endless mirror maze of his myriad personas. Because the true Jim is instantly recognizable, great and terrible, and it was laughable that he ever believed he could mistake it for something else. 

Still smiling, Jim reaches his blood-smeared hand out toward Sebastian's face, thumb stroking across his brow. He's sure it leaves a red streak, like an anointment. "I knew I wasn't wrong about you," Jim says.

* * *

_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and that was all the warning they got before the world was all noise, all heat, all shockwaves and no gravity. IED, buried too well for them to see before it was too late, the explosion underneath and to the side of their vehicle so that it flipped them completely over._

_The pain didn't set in until long after he landed, half on his side and half on his stomach, everything below his waist burning with an unnameable pain._

_Two of his men were wailing. There was no way they would survive. Their entrails painted the sand scarlet and even if they could put them back, they'd never be able to tell which bits were whose or untangle them from each other._

_Two gunshots, and a moment of pure perfect clarity._

_And then horrified yells. A third gunshot._

_A long darkness crept in, and in the darkness a woman crept in. She stayed by his bedside and told him in crisp, clear terms exactly what he needed to do and say. She was there every time he opened his eyes, as he lay in his sweat waiting for the absolution of surgery, brain free-floating in a hazy absence of all sense of time. She always told him what to do and say. Her eyes were the last thing he saw before they wheeled him away to rebuild his leg, glittering hard and dark and drilling into his mind the unconditional necessity of following her instructions. And she was there when he woke up after, all other thoughts drugged out of him so that all he knew was what he had to do, what he had to say._

_And so when the darkness cleared, he told his Unit Welfare Officer about the demons that crept into his men through the fire, camouflaged, wisps of war itself with fingers like long tendrils of flame, entering their eyes, their ears, their noses, exiting through the new holes in their bodies, shrieking with delight and heading for the last remaining soldier. He'd had to stop them, even though he knew there was no way to stop them, not truly. He was simply delaying them, a brief interlude in their mission to climb into every last one of them all. He took out the last viable host, a mercy really._

_He stuck to this story, repeated it the same way every time, like a mantra._  
  
* * *

After the incident with the blood, Jim starts being less secretive about his work. 

It turns out Jim has his fingers in a lot more pies than Sebastian imagined. Or maybe has his fingers on a lot more pulses would be the better cliché. Jim has his fingers hovering over a lot of pulses, and he can press on any one at any time to make it stop.

Jim pulls an exaggerated disgusted face once when Sebastian mentions thinking of him as a conman. It's such a petty term, like he's some small-time criminal rather than a grandmaster. But in the privacy of his own mind, Sebastian stands by it. The best con artists aren't just in it for the money—they get off on the power, the thrill of bringing people into the world they've constructed and convincing them to believe in it whole-heartedly. And Jim can claim to be so above it all as much as he wants, but Sebastian knows he gets off on it.

Case in point, the way he fixates on one particular pie, one Sherlock Holmes.

The tone Jim uses whenever he mentions him is more usually reserved for religious devotees finally laying eyes on a holy relic after a long pilgrimage, or maybe for true addicts finally getting a hit of their drug of choice after a long sobriety. There's ecstasy in it, but there's also a frustration, a disappointing acknowledgment that no reality can ever live up to its ideal. Sebastian is clued in to the significance of Sherlock Holmes by that tone, and also by the story Jim finally deigns to tell about his faked death.

It's not that Sebastian hasn't asked, this whole time. It's been almost eighteen months since he was told his husband had died in a tragic suicide, and Sebastian has asked Jim why almost as often as he's asked why Jim continues to take care of him. Perhaps the thing that finally makes a difference, the thing that finally gets him an answer, is a change in the way he phrases it. Or perhaps Jim just woke up one day deciding to change his mind—it's impossible to ascribe motivations to him with any certainty, Sebastian only has reasonable guesses.

"Why would you risk leaving it all behind?" is how Sebastian phrases it one day.

"Leaving what behind, dear?" Jim asks, his voice a mockery of a parent's patience toward a beloved child. 

Sebastian gestures in general at Jim's open laptop, where at the moment he's amusing himself by photoshopping crosshairs and explosions of blood onto photos of people whom Sebastian can only assume will shortly cease to exist. "All of this. Everything you do, everything that's yours, that you built." He isn't eloquent enough or stupid enough to express exactly what he means—Jim clearly loves his empire of lies and pain, has lavished care and attention and effort on it, laboured over it, bled for it. But Jim abhors sentiment, and so he just says, "Why would you fake your death when you had all that to live for?"

"Oh, you know, just to see the look on dear old Sherlock's face."

As usual, Sebastian can't tell if he's joking.

Jim lets the silence hang there, suspended between incredulity and belief, obviously savouring Sebastian's hesitant indecision. Finally, he smiles one of those unpleasant smiles that puts Sebastian out of his misery and says, "Do try to keep up. Of course I had good reason to, I'm not insane."

Sebastian begs to differ.

Jim raises an eyebrow at him, dares him to say it. He smirks when Sebastian remains silent. "I burnt the identity I'd been using on one big scam. I'm surprised you didn't hear about it, it was all over the papers. Moriarty On Trial, and then later Moriarty Never Existed All Along—made national headlines, it did."

"I wasn't reading many papers at the time. I was busy."

"Oh, I know you were," Jim replies, heavy with innuendo. He's giving him a look that says he knows everything Sebastian has ever done or thought in his meagre little life. 

Sebastian shakes it off. There are things in this world even Jim himself can't touch.

"Aaaaanyway," Jim sings, "I had to get rid of Jim Moriarty. It was the most expedient way to do so. And I almost tricked Sherlock into killing himself too, but of course if he were that easy, he wouldn't be a very good nemesis, now would he?"

That rhetorical question does nothing to disguise Jim's naked admiration for his so-called nemesis. If Sebastian were the jealous type... But he isn't, and so he just says, "Are your schemes always this stupidly complicated?"

Jim, abruptly bored, turns back to his computer. "To mortals, yes."

* * * 

_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and that was all the warning they got before the world was all noise, all heat, all shockwaves and no gravity. IED, buried too well for them to see before it was too late, the explosion underneath and to the side of their vehicle so that it flipped them completely over._

_The pain didn't set in until long after he landed, half on his side and half on his stomach, everything below his waist burning with an unnameable pain._

_Two of his men were wailing. There was no way they would survive. Their entrails painted the sand scarlet and even if they could put them back, they'd never be able to tell which bits were whose or untangle them from each other._

_Sebastian couldn't stand for the pain in his leg, and so his kills were messier than usual. It irked his professional pride, but he supposed men with lesser aim wouldn't have been able to make the shots at all._

_Even from his prone position, it only took him one bullet each. Two shots to put his men out of their misery like culled livestock._

_A third shot when the last survivor started screaming, Sebastian's actions automatic. Dead men tell no tales._

_When the woman first came to him, he hadn't been sure he wasn't dreaming. The fever pounded at him constantly, relentlessly. She told him what to say, made him repeat the words after her until they became second nature, like a holy chant. The war had driven plenty of men crazy. In the aftermath of a violent attack, his crazed actions would hardly be the most inexcusable thing the army had ever excused. He just needed to repeat after her. Tell them about the demons._

_The only time he protested, contradicted her account of things, tried to say that he had been of sound mind and had known exactly who he was killing, she had backhanded him across the face. The sting of that slap was sharp and clean, bright as the tinkling of a shining bell. It was the only moment he could remember in his long suffering before the surgery where he'd felt completely like himself._

_Afterwards, she had coached him on all of the details he would need to convince his Unit Welfare Officer about. Sebastian had never been a particularly good actor, but with metal rods stuck straight down his leg, agony and anguish were hardly things he needed to fake._

_For her one last hurrah, the coup de grace that would ensure the correct notations written into his file, she slipped a scalpel into his clammy palm._

_He would cut exactly as she instructed, exactly as deep and exactly as far as she said because he was nothing but anatomy and meat and no one is truly an individual so long as they followed the exact steps in the exact order because in a closed system when all the variables are known each outcome can be predicted and controlled for, and there would be so much blood, oh god, what if he'd done it wrong because there was too much blood, and the nurse raised the alarm exactly as planned but what if it wasn't supposed to go like this how much blood—_

Sebastian jerks awake, tries to jerk his wrists away from Jim's grip, but he tightens his fingers pointedly and Sebastian settles. 

"You were dreaming," Jim says.

"I was remembering."

"Hmm," Jim replies noncommittally. He doesn't seem to care about the difference. He adjusts his grip so that he can run his thumbs along the raised scars running up Sebastian's wrists, bumpy keloids that might or might not flatten and fade with time.

Maybe it's the way Jim strokes him—something moves Sebastian to confession. "I wasn't trying to kill myself."

"I know."

"I wasn't—I didn't even want to do it. I just had to in order to get the honourable discharge. So they would think I was mentally unfit."

Jim turns his thumb so his strokes become more like scratches, the perfectly manicured edge of his nail catching along Sebastian's skin. "Oh, my dear darling husband. _I know_."

Still half lying in his sweaty sheets, Sebastian looks up at him blankly, uncomprehending.

"Just who do you think told you to do that? To cut yourself for the benefit of the doctors, I mean."

"There was a woman..." Sebastian trails off.

"Yes, there was a woman, and she coached you through each and every one of the psychiatric evaluations until the only possible humane conclusion was a medical discharge, to release you from the traumas of war, which had mentally destabilized you so horrifically that you committed what might for a sane man be considered murder, if there had been any witnesses left for a court-martial."

"How do you...?"

"Please, Sebastian. Idiocy is most unbecoming on you." He presses viciously down with his thumb, digging his nail into the soft flesh of Sebastian's forearm.

"You sent the woman."

"I sent the woman," Jim agrees.

"How did you even know? We hadn't seen each other in years, we never spoke, you never wrote or sent word."

"If you think I haven't been taking care of my own husband this whole time, you are sorely mistaken. You know how I am with my things. I like to keep everything in perfect working order."

"This whole time. You mean since we've been married."

"Every single day, my dear."

"And that means—" that means it was Jim, through his agent, who had ordered him to cut himself open, like a second-hand vivisection. Sebastian shivers in something less kind than pleasure.

Jim rakes his nails over Sebastian's scars one more time, raising red welts over them that Sebastian can only register as blunt pressure over numb tissue. After that, he finally lets go, but Sebastian doesn't make any move to pull away. Jim is looking at him expectantly, like a lover waiting for a kiss, and Sebastian knows the words that hold his deliverance.

He says, "Thank you." And he means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  
> This fic is complete and will be posted in three chapters. The second chapter is being edited as we speak, and the third chapter will be going out to the amazing Junkshop_Disco for beta reading and Brit-picking soon. Special thanks and dedication to my darling C., for whose pleasure this fic was written.  
> All of the confidence scams referenced in this chapter are real and taken from [this list.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks)  
> And yes, I technically called Sherlock a pie.


	2. Extrapolation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian Moran earns his keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: PTSD, self-inflicted injuries, explicit mutilation and torture (not of main character), extreme bloodplay, consent issues, domestic violence (construed as consensual), d/s overtones, general antisocial and psychopathic behaviour

Seven months after his return to London sees Sebastian fully fit again. He's nowhere near his physical peak, but his leg can support running once more and so he trains for miles every day, outside, rain or shine. 

He returns from one of these runs to find Jim looking him up and down speculatively.

"How long?" Jim asks without a greeting.

"How long what?"

Jim furrows his brow in brief irritation before his face is placid and unreadable as a lake in winter again. "You have been timing your runs, haven't you? What was your time?"

"Oh. Thirty minutes and thirty-six seconds."

"Hmm. That'll do," he says, and Sebastian is given no further context as to what he's talking about, so he mops the sweat off his face with his workout towel and heads for the bathroom.

Jim follows.

"You have some incredibly annoying neighbours," Sebastian says, because if Jim is going to tail him into the shower then he is at least going to take the opportunity to complain. "Why would anyone in their right mind who isn't some second-rate-DJ-cum-actor-cum-fashion-photographer supported by their family fortune want to live here, anyway? Everybody is atrocious. I saw at least three different tiny dogs in designer puffer jackets this morning. I think I ran into the guy next door coming in drunk—it's nine a.m."

"I find their youthful follies refreshing and entertaining," Jim says, which only goes to reinforce Sebastian's point about nobody in their right mind.

"He either had a gaggle of pop stars with him, or he's the most cheerful human trafficker in all the land," Sebastian continues. "They were all singing." Fucking Primrose Hill.

At this point they've arrived at the bathroom, and Sebastian is disrobing. Jim makes no signs of even noticing. He flips the toilet seat down for a place to sit while Sebastian takes off his socks, and out of instinct or long habit he reaches an arm out to steady Sebastian when he wobbles for a second as he balances on one foot.

The man has wiped him clean so many times before that Sebastian supposes any pretence of privacy would be a farce at this point. And Sebastian has never been shy about his body, and so he drops all of his sweaty clothes into the hamper without self-consciousness and steps into the shower. 

"I'm not moving just because you don't like socialites," Jim continues while Sebastian turns on the water.

Sebastian closes his eyes under the hot spray, lets it wash away the stiffness in his muscles. "I'm not asking you to move. I'm just saying I hate hipsters."

"Duly noted," Jim says drily. "Should that information become relevant in the event of never, it'll be on record."

Sebastian ignores him in favour of working his soap into a lather. Of all the habits, good and bad, that the military has ingrained in him, he suspects the hardest one to shake will be the showering. He cleans himself from head to toe in under two minutes. It's a short time for a shower, but a rather long time to be subjected to an unwaveringly cold gaze. Jim keeps his eyes on him through the glass doors for the entire process. There's no sensuality in it, only calculating assessment. 

He takes the towel Jim hands him when he steps out.

"Get dressed," he orders, like Sebastian was going to lounge around in nothing but a towel all day if Jim hadn't told him to do otherwise. "You're finally going to start earning your keep around here."

"What does that mean?" 

"Work, Sebastian. Industry is a virtue, and all that."

"Yes, fine, but what does 'work' mean?"

Jim smiles. "I wouldn't wear anything that can't take a stain."

* * *

Work starts out simple.

His first few excursions simply involve standing around, looking intimidating. To be honest he doubts he even needs to do the latter, as nobody appears to look at him at all during their meetings with Moriarty. He's told to be a bodyguard, though, and in his mind that means at least some attempt to give the impression of being a serious threat, and so he sets his expression into what he imagines is an appropriately hard look and gazes into the middle distance.

It turns out Jim doesn't exactly just administer his own scams. All manner of people come to him for help with their own machinations, and pay him handsomely for his assistance. 

"I'm like a corporate consultant," he explains to Sebastian one night. "Idiots give me all their money so I can tell them things that should be obvious if they weren't so thick."

Half the time he seems to be running scams on these very same clients, double (and triple, quadruple) crossing them for his own pleasure. It's a wonder no one's tried to string him up by his intestines yet. 

"Oh, they've tried," Jim says smugly when Sebastian expresses the thought. "In fact, the memory of what happened to the last person who tried is what keeps the rest from trying again. But ordinary people's memories are so short, aren't they, dear? They may well need a reminder soon enough. Lucky I have a big strong man such as yourself to help with the dirty work."

He has Sebastian armed exquisitely for that eventuality. Sebastian may have wondered how he gained access to those weapons, once upon a time, but he's seen the vastness of Jim's operations now and wondering would be naïve. 

Jim requests his presence at a meeting that takes place at a coffee shop next, like it's just one of the dozens of normal business meetings that must happen under its roof daily. They sit and order espressos and look for all the world like two solicitors meeting an older woman about her will.

The woman passes a USB key across the table to Jim, but when he asks for a hardcopy document that's supposed to accompany it she hesitates.

Under the table, Jim nudges Sebastian's knee and he shifts, sitting up straighter. He dials his hard man face up a notch.

For the first time, one of Jim's clients bothers to take notice of his presence. Her eyes dart quickly over him before she coolly returns her gaze to Jim, but it's too late because she's given herself away. 

Jim asks for the document again, voice sweeter than syrup.

She reaches into her purse and Sebastian mirrors her movement by reaching into his jacket, fingers calm and sure on the grip of his pistol.

"You can call off your dog, Mr. Moran," she says with a perfectly polite smile, removing some folded sheets of paper from her bag. "These are rightfully yours, as per our previous agreement."

Sebastian frowns but Jim replies to her as though she had addressed him instead. That, coupled with Jim's bruising grip on his newly-healed thigh, is a pretty strong hint for Sebastian to keep his mouth shut.

He does ask him about it later, though. How could he not?

They have dinner at home and over his side of mushy peas Sebastian says, "'Mr. Moran'?"

"Whaaa~aaaaat?" Jim drawls, pouring wine and probably relishing Sebastian's confusion far too much.

"Why did she call you that?"

"Sometimes I go by my married name," he says offhandedly. "It's a time-honoured social custom, Sebastian, don't be judgemental. We'll speak no more of it." 

Sebastian wants to press for more, but he's not stupid enough to defy Jim's decree when the man's got a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, so he just nods.

***

_In the darkness, a woman crept in. She told him in crisp, clear terms exactly what he needed to do and say. Her cool voice was the only balm that alleviated the hellfires of his fever, and he drank up her words with a desperate thirst. He did and said as he was told. Her words became his words, her fictions his reality, and for brief flashes in all his meetings with the Unit Welfare Officer and the psychiatrist and the medical board, he would forget he was acting and not just believe it but become it._

_The demons entered his men through the fire, camouflaged, wisps of war itself with fingers like long tendrils of flame, entering their eyes, their ears, their noses, exiting through the new holes in their bodies, shrieking with delight and heading for the last remaining soldier. He'd had to stop them, even though he knew there was no way to stop them, not truly. He was simply delaying them, a brief interlude in their mission to climb into every last one of them all. He took out the last viable host, a mercy really._

_And just as he drank up her words, they drank up his._

_As he lay in his own sweat, and then later in his own blood, he wondered if he would recognise remorse if he ever felt it._

* * *

"You need to get fitted for a new suit," Jim says to him one day.

Sebastian has no real idea where his clothes have been coming from all this time. Some of them, especially the softer ones he wore in his convalescence, are new. They fit him well enough to indicate that whoever bought them clearly knew his size. Some of the clothes he remembers packing away in boxes and sending to his parents' for storage before his last deployment. It's a wonder they hadn't donated them all to the needy—or, more characteristically, thrown them all out. 

There's only one full suit in his wardrobe currently, old but in a classic enough cut that it can never really be out of fashion. He can see Jim's point. It won't do to wear the same one again and again, and the mere thought of sending to his parents for the rest of his suits makes him want to enlist all over again, so he comes to the conclusion that Moriarty, as usual, is correct.

"Before Friday night," Jim continues, eyes on his phone, typing furiously with his thumbs. "We're going to one of those private clubs I married you to get into, and if you're not in something bespoke I may as well just kill you now to avoid the utter shame. We'll need to hurry, though, there's not much time and I don't want haste to show in the workmanship."

"The Morans have a man on Savile Row. He already has my measurements," Sebastian offers.

"Oh right, him. Shame about him."

"Pardon?"

"An absolute tragedy that someone with such skill and talent had to be cut down in the prime of his powers, but c'est la vie."

"Are you saying he's died?"

"Oh yes, most certainly. Couldn't leave a loose end like that untied, could we? He knew intimate details about not only your body, but your family, your history, and your identity."

"You had him killed?"

"As surely as that parade of nurses and physicians we had through the house while you were on the mend, my dear."

It occurs to Sebastian that he should be shocked, or appalled, or something other than vaguely satisfied by this explanation of why he never saw the same one more than twice. "They also knew too much about me. And our address, too—god, they were doomed the second you told them how to get here."

"Yes," Jim agrees. "For a while there, you were like a cursed woman out of Greek mythology, weren't you? Just casting a halo of death over everyone around you. Well, no matter. The clean-up operation is just about complete, soon this won't be an issue anymore."

Because soon there will be no one in Sebastian's life that Jim doesn't allow to be there. Everything and everyone will be confined by the bounds of Jim's discretion. "What will we do when we run out of London tailors?"

"We prevent that from happening in the first place by using our handy false identities," Jim replies, and then adds in a loud stage whisper, one hand cupping his mouth like he's imparting a great secret, "but the real answer is we move to Milan."

And so Sebastian has several new suits made by a very fine tailor indeed, who thinks his name is Sam Candlemere and who is far too discreet to make any remark when he pays an improbably large sum in cash. 

On Friday night, he puts one of these new suits on and follows Jim faithfully. He finds himself escorted to a table at a club that can only be described as...not a place he would have gone of his own volition. It's some sort of new-age philosophical health club, the walls decorated with maps of the world and black and white photographs of Continental philosophers in thick, ornate frames. The drinks menu slipped unobtrusively onto the table offers a selection of organic juices and something they've decided to call 'elixirs.' 

Sebastian gives Jim a flat look.

"Turn that frown upside down, my dearest beloved!" Jim says brightly, putting on the bubbly character Sebastian has seen several times before, though never quite so fully directed at him. It's a lot. "This place is simply the yummiest! Oh, just wait 'til our guest sees it, he'll be absolutely giddy!"

Their appointed guest arrives a few minutes late, wearing a leather jacket that's seen better days and smelling of cigarettes and sweat. His cockney accent is so thick and so slightly archaic that he's got to be exaggerating it on purpose, like he's playing a character off a soap. Jim's little prank becomes apparent, then. A classic business power move: gain the upper hand by choosing an environment that will make the other party feel uncomfortable and out of his element.

Jim and the other man begin to talk shop, and Sebastian tunes in and out of the conversation in favour of watching the man's body language intently. Jim only brings him when there's at least some expectation of danger, and Sebastian assumes it's not the setting that will cause them any trouble, so he keeps an eye on the man.

"What do you care, anyway?" he says in response to something Jim suggested. "They'll just get in your way eventually. Tell you what, how about I do them Russian geezers for an extra fee?"

"The contract is non-negotiable," Jim replies, soft but firm. 

Sebastian leans ever so subtly back, leaving himself more slack in his beautifully tailored jacket so he can whip his arm across quickly with minimal drag, should he need to.

"What, you want me to do them Russians for free then? Because I might do, they're right fuckin' annoying."

"You may if you want, but the amount of money stays the same," Jim says.

"Right, tight bastard, you are." The man suddenly jerks forward, perking up like an excited puppy, and Sebastian nearly leaps across the table to snap his neck before he realises that the man is reaching for the forgotten menu lying between them.

"Ooh, posh place, this. Why didn't you tell me what kind of place it was? Get me one of them carrot juice things, yeah, with the cayenne in? My missus has been yammering me ear off about this cleanse," he says, apparently oblivious to how close he had come to dying. "You slags want one?"

Sebastian has never seen Jim have an involuntary reaction to anything, but he thinks for just a split second he came close. Just a twitch, practically imperceptible, before he murmurs no thank you. Sebastian has to use every once of discipline in his body to not burst out laughing.

After their meeting at the club, Jim informs Sebastian that he is going to accompany their new friend on his little mission to complete an arms deal and possibly kill some Russians. "Someone has to be there to see how his boys perform, but it absolutely cannot be me. I'm liable to make an executive toy out of his eyeballs if I ever see him again."

Sebastian snorts.

"You'll be playing a purely supervisory role. Under no circumstances do you intervene, or get your hands dirty," Jim continues, ignoring him.

"Shouldn't I know more information about the deal before I just stroll in trying to supervise?" 

"Did I _tell_ you more information?"

"No."

"So what can you glean from that?"

"That I should not know more information," Sebastian says dutifully.

"There's a good boy." Jim offers the praise up offhandedly, acts like he doesn't notice the way it makes Sebastian jerk to attention despite himself.

Sebastian goes to watch their man exchange currency and guns with a Russian gang who didn’t have enough foresight to acquire monetary insurance of Moriarty's protection. He goes to watch the deal go down almost without a hitch. He goes to watch, stone-faced and impassive, as the deal wraps up and everybody gets what they wanted but one guy just can't resist getting one last jibe in, and it kicks off into a heated exchange of words and then blows and finally bullets. 

In the end there are only three people dead on the ground, and the rest of them all go home happy with their hauls. Just regular workplace hazards, can't let these things bother you or you'll never get anywhere.

* * *

_In the darkness, a woman crept in. She told him in crisp, clear terms exactly what he needed to do and say. Her cool voice was the only balm that alleviated the hellfires of his fever, and he drank up her words with a desperate thirst. He did and said as he was told. Her words became his words, her fictions his reality, and for brief flashes in all his meetings with the Unit Welfare Officer and the psychiatrist and the medical board, he would forget he was acting and not just believe it but become it._

_He had led his men into the fire. He was the demons, the demons were him. And the only way to take them out was to take himself out, to excise himself. If they entered through his eyes and his mouth and refused to leave the same way, then he would simply create new openings for them, long slits they couldn't possibly miss. And it worked. They bubbled up like poison juices, fetid and hot and so abundant that they never seemed to stop flowing out._

_As he lay in his own blood, he wondered if he would recognise remorse if he ever felt it._

_Because the woman didn't know he wasn't that good of an actor, that good of a liar. He repeated what she said faithfully but in the end the only way he could drive in that final nail into the coffin of his sanity before all the professional eyes assessing him was to tell the truth. He was the demon that had led his men into the fire._

* * *

There's a warehouse in Hackney that Sebastian apparently now owns. Well, to be more accurate, there's a warehouse in Hackney that seems to be owned by a non-existent businessman, and if one cares to look into it further one can trace the ownership back through one shell corporation after another until finally arriving at one of the many aliases Sebastian is instructed to give out whenever he is required to sign his name for anything. 

Anyway, the point is that they have a warehouse out in Hackney, and it's there that a low-ranking foreign diplomat attempts to have Moriarty assassinated. 

Sebastian has to hand it to the man—he almost succeeds by preying on their native sexism. The assassin he contracts is a woman, and she slips into their meeting in the guise of being his personal assistant. One of Jim's hired thugs even lets her keep her bag, and none of them pay enough attention to her to see her reach into said bag.

She moves fast. She's clearly skilled, and it's a shame that she's working for the other side, a shame that no one told her Moriarty would've paid her better. Then again, her technique isn't flawless. She makes the mistake of deciding to take out the thugs first, instead of going straight for Jim, and less than a second after she kills one man she's dead herself, cleanly laid out with a shot through the heart.

Sebastian shoots Jim's other hired man next, the last of the pair that had let her slip in past their guard. He acts without hesitation, doesn't pause to wait for Jim's orders. He just _knows_. People who fail that spectacularly only have one fate.

The diplomat he takes out at both kneecaps, and then he holsters his gun again, leaving him to writhe around on the floor, trying to commando crawl away. It's a large warehouse. The exit is not particularly close.

"What do you want me to do with him, boss?"

"Oh, you've been doing such an excellent job so far, don't let me stifle your creativity," Jim says. He flicks his hand dismissively, as though shooing him away, and he walks off to sit on a stack of boxes as though he could wait all day. The way he lounges makes the boxes seem like a high-end leather office chair, or a throne.

Sebastian isn't fooled by Jim's seeming nonchalance. He knows his performance will be graded.

"Mr. de Haas," Sebastian calls, catching up to the crawling man with a few long strides. "We're not finished."

The diplomat burbles terrified excuses for what he's done, but they both know that there's only one way for this to end, and eventually even his pleas for mercy sound forced and trite, like he's just going through the motions, following a script.

Sebastian doesn't waste any more breath replying to a dead man. 

He empties the rest of his magazine into his legs and feet, since he'll have to chuck out the whole lot along with the gun anyway. It keeps de Haas from trying to escape again, but it does shorten the timeframe he has to work with, since Sebastian knows he's hit some arteries. He has at most a minute before de Haas loses consciousness, and there's no point if he can't feel it. Sebastian pulls out his Ka-Bar and gets to work butchering.

He removes all of the parts of de Haas that can be easily removed and remain identifiable, starting from top to bottom. Nose, tongue, each finger, nipples, penis, testicles. His slices are quick, efficient, single clean movements that embody an economy of motion he prides himself on. Unfortunately, it's still not quick enough, and de Haas passes out before Sebastian is finished removing every toe. He does them anyway, for the visual impact, but without the agonized screams it's hard to tell if he's done them right. After the obvious appendages, he goes back to take out the trickier bits: eyes, teeth, things that take more time to remove nicely without crushing them. He arranges each little piece of de Haas in neat rows next to his body, like a grid, like tally marks, like an anatomy lesson about what happens when you try to fuck with James Moriarty.

De Haas stops breathing somewhere in the middle of Sebastian trying to decide if he should put the toes in a crowded row of ten under the two widely-spaced rows of five fingers. Sebastian doesn't give two shits about aesthetics, but Jim will want to take pictures and he's always so fussy about everything being just so.

The sound of Jim's leather soles clacking on the warehouse floor echoes loudly, and the roaring of blood in Sebastian's ears suddenly disorientates him. He can hear too many echoes above the pounding of his own pulse. When his brain finally manages to catch up, he realises that it isn't just the sound of footsteps. It's also clapping. Jim is applauding.

"Beautifully executed," Jim says softly, as he comes to a stop directly behind Sebastian's kneeling form.

Sebastian squeezes his eyes shut. The slick blood all over him still feels warm, and he reaches one shaking scarlet hand out to straighten the severed nose so that it lines up neatly with the teeth surrounding it. It's the first person he's killed since he's been back in London, the first person he's killed since his own three men, and the ecstasy of it thrills through his blood, making it sing almost as much as Jim's approval does. 

Jim's hand snakes up the back of his neck, his fingers twisting into the short hair at the base of his skull, pulling hard. "You've done a very fine job indeed, husband mine," he says, and Sebastian can't clamp his eyes shut any tighter but he still tries because—

_The sun was glinting off the gravel in a way that didn't look quite real, and the IED was buried exactly where the young insurgent he'd paid off had told him it would be. He aimed their vehicle so that the side he wasn't on would take the brunt of the explosion._

_Even so, it still hurt. He hadn't expected it to hurt so much, and he couldn't seem to move his leg or much else below his waist. But there was no time to worry about it because he had a finite window of time before backup arrived._

_There was a bullet each for the annoying one, the incompetent one, and the one who had steadily needled at him on a near-daily basis since their days together at Sandhurst. He had been waiting for a very, very long time for the satisfaction._

_He couldn't make his legs carry his weight or even move, really, so he had to put them down from a prone position._

_As he lay in his own blood, he wondered if he would recognise remorse if he ever felt it.  
_

Sebastian opens his eyes to find Jim's face hovering inches over his. He's somehow managed to get him flat on the floor, far enough away from the corpses that they aren't lying in pools of blood. Not that it matters—Sebastian is covered in so much of it that they might as well have been. It transfers over to Jim wherever they touch, which is everywhere, and they're lucky they're both wore their cheap suits to this shit show. Only, with Jim, it's never luck.

Jim bites when he kisses, and when Sebastian doesn't reciprocate satisfactorily he snarls and slaps him, not hard but hard enough to get Sebastian's attention back.

"It wasn't an accident. I killed them on purpose," Sebastian says.

"Well I know that," Jim replies, rolling his eyes. He's undoing Sebastian's shirt buttons. "I watched you do it, didn't I?"

"No, I mean back in the desert. My men. The discharge. I planned it in advance. I wanted them dead and I decided I'd make it happen myself."

"Yes, you're enterprising like that. You take matters into your own hands. I like that about you." Jim dives for the skin just below the hollow of his throat, which he's now offering like a dog in submission. Jim is not acting surprised enough.

"No, listen—I didn't just shoot them. I mean I knew the IED would be there. I drove them out to it on purpose. I even—there was another soldier who was supposed to go with us, but he wasn't part of my plans, and I arranged a last minute assignment for him somewhere else. Everyone in that patrol vehicle was somebody whose death I'd planned."

Of all the reactions Sebastian anticipated, Jim's look of deep irritation is not one of them. He jerks Sebastian's head back with a firm grip in his hair that sends sparks of pain along his scalp, as though the soft parts of his throat could be any more exposed, as though the soft parts of his whole being haven't already been proffered to Jim for ages. "Do you know how annoying it is," he growls, teeth clenched, "when I speak and. You. Don't. Listen." He punctuates each word with a harsh yank, and Sebastian isn't sure whether his hair will rip out before his neck snaps.

He is sure, however, that his cock has never been harder before in his life.

"When I say I know," Jim continues, "I mean I know everything. It's pathetic that you think there is any part of you that doesn't belong to me thoroughly and completely. It's pathetic that you think _you_ can hide anything from _me_. You don't have secrets, Sebastian. All you have are things I allow you to keep."

With his head tilted so far back, swallowing is impossible. The noise Sebastian makes when he tries to anyway is humiliating. The skin over his adam's apple is stretched so taut that it feels like any pressure on it at all could burst all the veins beneath. "So you knew all along," he manages to rasp out, between ragged breaths. 

"Why do you think I like you so much?" Jim says, and his tone has switched whiplash quick to be incongruously playful, light-hearted, but Sebastian knows better than to be fooled because the grip on the back of his head remains almost more intense than he can bear, and Jim's other hand is working deftly, swiftly between their bodies, rucking up Sebastian's shirt and pulling open their belts, their flies. 

They haven't fucked in all this time since Sebastian's return from the war. They haven't fucked since they've been married, and Sebastian wants it so badly he could cry. In fact, he almost does, feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes when Jim finally lets go of his hair. He drinks in deep gulping breaths and forgets about the tingling pain on his scalp as soon as both of Jim's hands find their way to his cock, jutting hard and obscene out of the rumpled bloody mess of clothing Jim has pushed aside. 

Jim is doing something with the blood now, dragging his hands through it and slicking up his cock with it, with _the dead man's blood_ and when Sebastian's brain finally registers what's happening, Jim is getting ready to push into Sebastian with his hard length all lubed up with _blood_ and Sebastian just cannot scramble away fast enough.

"Abso-bloody-lutely fucking not." A lesser man would have screamed it. Sebastian manages to only very slightly raise his voice above normal indoor volume.

"What?"

"Hepatitis. HIV. Literally every single other blood-borne disease in the world."

"You think the attaché of the Dutch ambassador to Serbia has every single blood-borne disease in the world? It seems awfully unlikely, Sebastian."

Sebastian is too busy frantically pulling up his trousers to be bothered by Jim's mocking drawl. Any barrier between himself and Jim's blood-slicked cock is a welcome one. "I think I don't know what he has. Or had. The point is I don't want to find out a few weeks later by manifesting symptoms."

"So you're calling a halt," Jim says flatly. He raises a single eyebrow.

Sebastian knows, he just knows, that he isn't supposed to. He doesn't make the calls. Jim decides when things start and when they end. Sebastian has no right. But he remembers the 80s, the 90s, the AIDS crisis and he just can't let this be the way he contracts it. It isn't even a story he can repeat at a support group, not that Jim would allow him to attend a support group meeting without having every member killed immediately afterwards, which would seriously hinder the development of any sense of support. 

He takes too long to sort through these hysterical thoughts, and the chance for him to recant his refusal has passed. 

Jim goes cold. His face closes off neatly, like pieces of a puzzle box slotting back into place. He tucks himself back into his clothes and smooths the fabric down. Despite being covered in blood, he still gives the impression of being immaculate.

Sebastian begins to apologise, but he's cut off by Jim instructing him to begin packing up. Jim pulls out his phone and makes arrangements for the warehouse to be cleaned. He photographs each of the bodies and sends the pictures to the parties that he deems most in need of seeing them, as a warning or a reminder or maybe even a diversion. He orders Sebastian around like he's just another employee, like they hadn't had their tongues in the backs of each other's mouths mere minutes ago, and Sebastian knows there is no god who can help him when he admits to himself that he is turned on even by Jim's frostiness.

* * *

Sebastian all but sprints for the shower as soon as they arrive home. 

Jim had spent the entire car ride pointedly ignoring him to poke around on a tablet device, creasing his brows in such a perfect simulacrum of concentration that Sebastian believed he had genuinely forgotten about him in favour of doing something incredibly important like arranging a stock market collapse or coordinating the ascendance of a puppet government in a developing nation. 

Sebastian had spent the entire car ride so hard that he thought he might die.

In the safety of the bathroom now, he strips off his ruined clothes and leaves them in a pile on the floor. They will have to be burned. The dried blood coating his arms and his face has hardened into what feels like a shell, a casing that he suddenly, desperately wants to be rid of. He cranks the hot water and jumps in, lathering up hurriedly, cleaning himself as quickly has possible so that he can finally wank for about a billion years. 

The water finally runs more clear than crimson and Sebastian hisses as he finally gets a hot soapy hand around his insistent erection. He doesn't get more than a few strokes in, though, before the bathroom door opens and Jim strolls in.

He's in shirtsleeves and slacks, no cufflinks in, top two buttons undone. He's also barefoot, which is rare. The wetness of his slicked-back hair is a clue as to how he's already spotless, not a trace of blood left on him. 

He strips out of his shirt and slacks quickly, without sensuality. Sebastian could come right there at the sight of him. He squeezes the base of his cock roughly to calm himself down.

Without saying a word to him, Jim steps unceremoniously into the shower and punches him in the face.

It's not a light punch. Jim clearly knows technique—the way he swings his whole hip into the motion puts a lot of weight behind it. From the immediate blunt pain that blossoms across the bridge of his nose and then the near-immediate numbness that sets in across most of his face after, Sebastian can tell that Jim's broken it.

He doesn't lose his footing, but it's a close thing. The force of the hit sends his head snapping to the side and he hits it on the wall of the shower, barely feeling it in comparison to the punch. Normally, his instincts would have him retaliating already, would have him incapacitating the attacker in less than three moves and killing him in less than four, but it's Jim so his instincts just tell him to take it.

Jim isn't satisfied with just one punch. He swings again, lands another in exactly the same place as the first one, and the fresh pain is more than doubled, enough to make Sebastian's knees wobble. Jim hooks a foot around the back of one of those knees and pulls. 

Sebastian goes down, so willingly that he doesn't even break his own fall with his arms. The back of his head hits the floor hard enough for stars to swim across his vision briefly, and the very real possibility of getting a head injury in the near future does nothing to make him defend himself. 

He does finally make a sound when Jim punches him again, though. 

Jim smiles, and backhands him one more time for good measure. Sebastian's teeth hit his tongue and he spits out blood, a tiny amount compared to how much is flowing freely from his nose. He can't breathe and the whole world smells and tastes of copper. 

Jim is straddling him and his cock is a rigid line against Sebastian's hip. Sebastian realizes where this is going a split second before Jim reaches out to drag two fingers through the blood running down the sides of his face. He smears it over the glistening head of his prick, the red almost comically like paint against his skin, and it's all the warning Sebastian gets before his legs are shoved up and Jim is penetrating him using nothing but his own blood as lube. 

It hurts like a fucking explosion on hot desert sand.

Sebastian loses his erection, may even lose consciousness briefly. Flashes of memory come back, memories of the last time they did it like this. Not like _this_ , exactly, but on the bottom of Sebastian's tub in his old flat before he shipped out, with the water running into his eyes like this, trying not to drown like this. Jim's hips snap relentlessly, pumping in and out of him and it shouldn't feel good, it doesn't feel good, but it feels amazing and he grasps at Jim's arms to try to hold him in place, try to convince him to never stop.

Jim bares his teeth and it's impossible to tell if he's snarling or smiling, it's all the same. Everything is too wet and too slippery and too warm and every time Sebastian thinks about closing his eyes Jim digs fingertips into the parts of his face that will need an x-ray and some stitches later, if he survives this. 

"You don't get to say no, to anything, ever," Jim says, his voice quiet and calm and silky. He slows his thrusts to match his tone, hips grinding in languid circles, rolling against Sebastian's pelvis. Sebastian can feel himself stiffening even though neither of their hands go anywhere near his semi-flaccid cock. 

The thing is, Jim had still stopped. But he understands that it doesn't mean he can say no, it just means that Jim had decided to indulge in his trespass just that once. Never again.

Sebastian moans and tilts his hips up, rocks back against Jim. It's taken them nearly four years to consummate their marriage.

Jim's next thrust buries him as deep as possible into Sebastian, and then he stays there, not moving. One hand is holding Sebastian's left leg up, fingernails digging into the scars, and the other hand is holding Sebastian's chin. "You will never say no to me, no exceptions," Jim murmurs tenderly, brutally.

"Yes, god, never," Sebastian agrees, and means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian's fake name, "Sam Candlemere," comes from an amalgamation of two characters' names in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone," one of the stories in ACD's _The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes_. In the original drama version of this case, the villain was Colonel Sebastian Moran, but it was changed to a different character for the short story version.
> 
> I had specific celebrity personas in mind for their madcap Primrose Hill neighbour and for the Cockney tough they meet at the health club. I'll write a free drabble for anyone who can guess who either of them are, although C. is exempt from this contest as THEY KNOW FULL WELL.


	3. Execution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problem of Sherlock Holmes remains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: war imagery, graphic violence, surgical imagery, PTSD, extremely dubious consent, domestic violence (construed as consensual), d/s overtones, general antisocial and psychopathic behaviour, sadomasochism

_Sebastian couldn't stand for the pain in his leg, but even from his prone position it only took him one bullet each. Two shots to put his men out of their misery like culled livestock. A third shot when the last survivor started screaming, Sebastian's actions automatic. Dead men tell no tales. What a happy coincidence it was that he'd hated the useless, obsequious, waste of a man anyway. Three bullets well spent._

_The woman came to him but she had Jim's face. It was her words still, telling him what to say, making him repeat the words until they became second nature, like a holy chant. When he protested to explain that he had been of sound mind and had known exactly who he was killing, it was Jim this time, Jim who backhanded him across the face. It was Jim's hand, and Sebastian leaned into it far more eagerly than he had ever leaned into any caress._

_Jim was there at his surgery. Sebastian could see himself, awake, watching Jim cut into his leg and saw into his bones. His muscles throb with Jim's hands buried to the wrist inside his flesh, but it didn't hurt like it was supposed to. It was agony of course, but it felt right, like he had been stupid up until now to try to live his whole life without Jim clawing through his flesh._

_And afterwards, Jim's whispers were honey poured into his ears, coaching him on every detail of all the lies he had to tell. When the time came, he didn't just slip the scalpel into Sebastian's clammy palm. He guided Sebastian's hands, fingers folding over his like a parent teaching a child to write by holding the pencil together. They traced over Sebastian's veins as one would trace abc's in a copybook, and when the blood flooded out it wasn't just a ruse, it was a glorious tribute for Jim, flowing everywhere and soaking everything, everything was so, so wet, and he was rock hard_ — 

Sebastian startles awake to the sight of Jim straddling him, naked, a slick hand guiding Sebastian's already lubed cock into his even slicker opening, like he's been preparing for a while. 

Before he can fully process the situation his instincts kick in, and his hands fly up to incapacitate the person crouching over him in a pitch dark room. But all it takes is a sharp tap on his hip from Jim, combined with a soft warning sound that's not even a word, and Sebastian goes slack.

Jim sinks onto him and Sebastian obediently thrusts upward to meet the plush flesh of his arse every time he grinds down. He wants to ask Jim something but he doesn't want the sound of his own voice to drown out the much more palatable sounds of Jim's breaths rushing out of his mouth, the only sign he shows of not being in complete control of his body 

As he rushes toward the inevitable conclusion, though, Sebastian just has to know—"How long were you doing that while I was asleep?"

Jim's hips slow down. He rolls them in a languid circle, trapping Sebastian inside. "How long do you think I was doing it?"

Sebastian stays quiet, knowing it's a trick question. There is no right answer. He fists his hands into his sheets and grits his teeth as Jim speeds up again, encompassing him in maddening heat but refusing to let him come.

"Do you think I should've woken you up to ask permission?" Jim asks.

This question is not a trick, because Sebastian knows for sure what the answer is supposed to be. "No," he says, eager to demonstrate that knowledge. "You should take whatever you want whenever you want."

"That's right, my darling sweet poppet," Jim says, voice dripping with venom, and he's moving so fast now that it's almost painful, bouncing on Sebastian's pelvis and occasionally landing hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He's clenching arrhythmically, and sometimes it feels so good that Sebastian wants to sob, but sometimes it's so tight that it hurts. Sebastian doesn't know if this is any good for Jim, doesn't see how that kind of sandpaper friction could possibly be doing it for him, but then Jim is grabbing his wrist and guiding his hand onto Jim's cock and using his hand to masturbate himself to completion. 

He paints Sebastian's stomach and chest with his come, and then he climbs off of him. "Finish yourself off," he commands, so Sebastian does.

Jim cleans him off with a damp towel after, his movements terse and efficient without any lingering touches. It reminds Sebastian of the long months he spent helpless under Jim's care, so much so that he almost thinks he'll get hard again. 

But his body isn't quite up for it, and a sudden exhaustion overtakes him all at once, like a wave rushing over him. He doesn't remember if Jim leaves the room before he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

The L115A3 that Jim gives him is identical to the army-issue sniper rifle he made his name on. Jim calls him "Colonel" when he hands over the case. 

For days, Sebastian practices putting it together, taking it apart, loading it, positioning it, fitting it with a variety of different sights, and generally holding it. It's not that he'll ever forget how to do any of those things for as long as he lives. It's just that he's been out of the game for almost a year at this point, and Jim likes perfection in everything. Sebastian likes to do things clean, but he's never before felt this overwhelming desire to please. And so he practices for days.

Jim acts like he hasn't been paying close attention to Sebastian's rehearsals, but when Sebastian privately decides he's as close to perfect as he's going to get, he doesn't have to announce it to Jim, because Jim is already there, giving him a target to sit on.

It's a rooftop in Croydon. There's no sand anywhere, and it's chilly enough that Sebastian has to wear a coat. Jim speaks to him through an earpiece, and Sebastian doesn't get to decide when to shoot based on when the sightlines are best. He has to shoot when Jim says, when it's most convenient for his plans.

Five hours later, Jim gives the word, and Sebastian drops the target.

It feels like he is nothing but a tool, an extension of Jim, a prosthesis. He is the long arm of Moriarty, reaching out to pull the trigger when Jim's brain gives the signal.

The target had been a teenaged girl, before Sebastian's bullet found her head. She'd been the daughter of someone stupid enough to both cross Moriarty and have a daughter. Sebastian wonders if it's supposed to be a test. Nothing is a coincidence with Jim: the fact that his first long-range assignment from Jim was a child is unlikely to be his first uncontrolled variable. 

It doesn't matter, anyway. Sebastian will drop anything Jim wants, and surely he knows that by now.

Jim doesn't always tell him who the targets are, so Sebastian knows a special point is being made when he does.

"There's a poetic justice in this," Jim drawls in his ear with a generic American newsreader accent. 

The man on the other end of Sebastian's scope this time is a close colleague of Mycroft Holmes. Jim will be pinning this murder on somebody else he wants to eliminate, and a third party will take care of them, and then a fourth party will commit a revenge killing over it, and on down the line, like perfect little soldiers who don't even know that it's Jim at the end of their chain of command. And of course the fact that it's an indirect hit against Sherlock Holmes' brother is just icing on top of Jim's favourite pie.

"I'm using you in the exact same way people like our dear Mycroft Holmes have used you. You even have the same gun and everything. The same goals. Economic gain, securing power, maintaining control over a strategic region." Jim seems to get bored of the accent and switches to something more like his regular speaking voice. "It's all exactly the same, isn't it?"

"Is this where you want me to rise up to defend the honour of our gloried armed forces?" Sebastian asks out of the side of his mouth. He supposes there's no real need for him to stay quiet. Jim is far too meticulous to leave the area unsecured. But certain habits die hard, and the less he moves his jaw, the less he has to readjust his sight.

"Is it?" 

Apparently Jim is in that kind of mood.

Sebastian stifles a sigh and says, " I joined to annoy my parents, and because it was a legal way to get a gun in my hands and kill people with it. They tell you you're defending the nation. If you buy into that, then it isn't exactly the same. There's a qualitative difference between one person's economic gain, versus protecting the economy of an entire nation of people you're supposed to feel loyal to."

"It's really more a quantitative difference," Jim corrects fussily. "And you didn't buy into it?" 

"Pretending I did was a good way to not look like a psychopath."

"You have a history of telling stories to make you appear less psychopathic, don't you?"

There's no point in replying to that observation. Jim is the architect of half of those stories. Instead, he half changes the subject and says, "Are you angling for me to admit that I've pledged my loyalty to you like you're my nation?"

"Oh no, darling. I'm better than a nation. I would never ask you to be _less_ psychopathic. I like you just as you are. Now take the shot."

Sebastian does, and that's that.

* * *

Jim keeps Sebastian on a roof for almost three days with no more than the occasional instruction to continue staying there. Sebastian begins rationing his water as soon as he figures out that it might turn into an endurance run. He has an energy bar in his pocket and his coat is thick enough to withstand the chilliest parts of the nights. It's barely a discomfort. It's practically recreational.

late in the morning of the third day, Jim strolls up onto the rooftop, sits down on the ledge beside Sebastian with his back to the open sky, and hums a tune Sebastian doesn't recognize. After a few minutes of this, he slides down, sitting next to Sebastian now but facing him. "Keep your eye on our prize," he instructs, and so Sebastian adjusts his grip and brings the target into sight.

Jim reaches over and undoes his belt.

It takes all of Sebastian's self-discipline to keep still as Jim unzips his fly and snakes cold fingers into the flap of his boxers, but the British Army did spend a lot of money on training to make sure he would never crack under pressure.

He gets hard embarrassing quickly, which comes as no surprise to either of them. Sometimes all it takes is for Jim to be present, to be visible, and Sebastian is already halfway there. 

The velvet heat of Jim's hand contrasts with the shock of air on the exposed tip, and Jim massages him for a while, just working his hand slowly up, squeezing here and there, before forming a loose circle with his fingers and sliding back down smoothly. It doesn't take long for Sebastian to produce enough precum to make the whole operation slippery, wet, almost too frictionless for his taste. Of course Jim immediately tightens his grip until it's just on the edge of nearly painful again.

Sebastian is aware that his own breathing has quickened into pants, and he focuses on consciously slowing it down again, taking deep, steadying inhales. Jim, the fucker, changes the timing of his strokes to synchronize with Sebastian's breaths. For every long inhale, he tugs upward. For every pause between breaths, he rubs his palm against the head of Sebastian's cock through his foreskin. For every shuddering exhale, he pulls down again, until the heel of his hand hits Sebastian's balls.

They continue like that for a while, in harmony, until Sebastian realizes that he's breathing desperately fast again and Jim is working him at a relentless pace. He takes a deep breath and holds it.

He brings the target back into focus and steadies his hands. There's almost no wind today. The shot would be easy.

Jim, meanwhile, spends the entirety of Sebastian's held breath rubbing his thumb in small circles into the ridge just under the head of Sebastian's cock. 

When Sebastian finally exhales, he changes tack, simply moving his hand quickly up and down with no fancy moves, like he might do when he's wanking himself off. He doesn't change his rhythm, doesn't change his grip or the pressure, and just lets Sebastian's pleasure build and build.

Sebastian nears the edge of no return and bites his bottom lip to keep from making any sound. It's hard to maintain visuals on the target because his eyes are blurring, practically watering. All it would take now would be just one flick of Jim's wrist, one command from his lips, one change in his rhythm to tip him over.

"Sebastian," Jim whispers against his ear, soft and husky and that's it, that voice is all he can take, he's going to—

But Jim clamps his hand down hard at the base of Sebastian's cock, practically clenches his fist, and Sebastian's not sure but he thinks he hears himself yelp—

"Take the shot," Jim says, voice clear and firm.

Sebastian moves on autopilot. He lines up the scope, braces his shoulder, adjusts his support hand, zeroes his rifle, and squeezes the trigger.

The same instant that the man in his crosshairs dies, Jim begins stroking his unflagging erection again. He leans in to bite the shell of Sebastian's ear and Sebastian, no longer needing to maintain perfect stillness, bucks up violently. He thrusts into Jim's fist once, twice, and comes in spurts all over his hand as well as the low wall of the roof's ledge.

He comes for what feels like a long time, euphoric, shaky. It feels like being buoyed up by gusts of pleasure, and his hips stutter forward involuntarily. Jim keeps his hand on him the whole time, prolonging it. When it finally feels over-sensitized and too painful to be fun, Sebastian tries to jerk away. Jim gives him a few final squeezes to emphasize a point. Sebastian grits his teeth through it, and then Jim finally lets go and tucks him back into his pants.

Across the street, an employee enters the office of the former target begins to scream. Some sort of alarm begins to ring and the building slowly fills with the confused buzz of people shuffling towards the exits.

Sebastian is gulping in sweet breaths of air and trying not to float away. There's still work to be done.

"We've—" Sebastian pauses to clear his throat because he did _not_ expect it to sound that wrecked. "We've got to clean up. We've left DNA evidence all over the scene."

By 'DNA evidence' he of course means his jizz. All over. Everywhere.

Jim full on laughs at him and says breezily, "Don't worry about it. I'll have someone take care of it."

Sebastian does not relish the thought of somebody on Jim's payroll coming to their own conclusions about why Sebastian had an orgasm while killing someone, but he can tell that Jim is positively reveling in the pleasure of the idea, and so he refuses to say anything about it.

It doesn't stop Jim from smirking anyway. "If I do this enough," he muses, tapping a finger on his chin, "do you think I could cultivate some kind of Skinner operant conditioning response in you? Spontaneous climax for every person you kill? Seminal fluid with every bullet you spend?"

"Please never say 'seminal fluid' again."

Jim slaps a grin onto his face, one of his horrifying ones, and says, "If you can get everything unassembled and back to the car in under two minutes, I'll help you produce more seminal fluid on the ride back."

* * *

There are days when Jim disappears. He conducts business in Slovenia, in Malaysia, in small rural towns in the empty parts of America and Australia that mapmakers don't even bother colouring in—who the fuck knows why he even has business interests there. He doesn't always tell Sebastian where he goes or when he'll be back. Sebastian knows better than to ask.

It's normal, part of the routine rhythms of living with an emperor of crime. That's why it takes Sebastian so long to register the shift into something different.

Jim spends longer and longer away, comes back for arbitrary stretches of time that have no discernible pattern, disappears again at odd hours of the day. Sometimes he doesn't leave, but locks himself in one of the rooms on the top floor that Sebastian never tries to enter. 

He may as well be in Malaysia, though, for all the attention he pays Sebastian.

He's doing research of some sort, and his files and USB keys and economics graphs plotted meticulously on grid paper begin to spill out beyond the confines of his locked rooms. Sebastian tries his best not to look. Everything Jim does is buried in multiple layers of functionality, and it takes no stretch of the imagination at all to think that one layer is some ruthless trust exercise testing Sebastian's willpower.

Still, he can't literally blind himself, and Jim leaves a few things out so blatantly that Sebastian must be meant to see them.

The name "Sherlock" is a repeated refrain on random sheets of paper that intrude into Sebastian's life, the coffee table, the kitchen sink, the mantelpiece, the floor so he has to watch where he steps.

It would be more bearable if Jim would at least fuck him once in a while.

Sebastian tries to run it off. He does circuits around Regent's Park and grits his teeth into what he hopes can pass for a neighbourly smile when he sees the bloke from next door. He's dyed his hair a bright pinky magenta for no reason that Sebastian can possibly fathom, and whenever Sebastian greets him he chirps "hiyaaaa!" and waves with one hand. The other hand is usually holding the leash of a dog who honestly might be manic, given that Sebastian has never seen it not wagging its tail too fast for comfort.

Sebastian decides he hates the neighbours more than ever.

He takes his exercises indoors, does reps and curls and crunches on the dining room floor until he wants to throw up. 

Jim continues not to touch him.

* * *

Finally, one day, when curls have gotten boring and he's out on a run again, ducking and weaving between sloe-eyed hipsters with unwashed hair and oversized jumpers clutching mason jars of wheatgrass juice or whatever, Sebastian receives a text message from Jim.

"I've got a job for you," it says, and it isn't sex but it is killing, which is just about the same. 

He runs home and the instructions are pinned to the wall of the entryway with one of Sebastian's knives buried deeper than one would think Jim's skinny arms would be capable of. It's written in as much of Jim's house code as Jim has deigned to teach him, the rest in plain English, and it's decorated in sparkly stickers shaped like fish and crabs and bubbles, because it's Jim.

He follows the instructions to the letter and winds up at an empty block of luxury condos in Kingston, building completed but not yet open to the market. He takes the stairs all the way up to a penthouse suite and finds Jim already there.

It's empty of furniture and so Jim is lounging on the floor, suit pressed and immaculate as always, one knee bent up and the other leg stretched long. His back is to the floor-to-ceiling windows that serve as one entire wall, and his long white fingers are poking at one of his countless phones.

Sebastian of course gets instantly, Pavlovianly hard.

Jim's smile spreads like an oil spill across his face. He tilts his head towards the window he's leaning against, and scooches to the side to make room for Sebastian to set up.

Sebastian puts his cases down and gets to work.

Jim's gestures give him the approximate direction of his mark, but he doesn't know exactly what he's supposed to be aiming for. 

"You'll know it when you see it," Jim murmurs, so Sebastian sweeps his scope slowly and meticulously over his entire field of vision, pausing to look at every window, every car, every passer-by on the street. It's like a lethal Where's Wally book, only he has no idea what he's looking for. He knows he's liable to get punched in the throat if he asks Jim for more clarification, so he just keeps scanning, scanning, scanning.

Jim isn't wrong. He definitely knows it when he sees it.

It's enough of a shock to deflate his erection, which is really saying something these days.

"Is that..."

"It's you!" Jim sing-songs.

There, in another empty condo, six storeys lower and not the best angle for a shot, sits the spitting image of Sebastian himself, holding a newspaper up so that it partially obscures his face.

Upon further scrutiny—and Sebastian puts his incredibly expensive Moriarty-funded scope hard to work to scrutinize the fuck out of the situation—Sebastian comes to the conclusion that Jim isn't so crazy that he went out and found some poor fucker to accept massive facial reconstruction surgery.

"Is it some sort of wax work? A mannequin?"

"It's a RealDoll, actually," Jim says in some kind of Texan accent, for no relevant reason Sebastian can think of. 

Sebastian has browsed enough Internet porn to know that RealDolls are patented ultra-rrealistic sex dolls. "That doesn't make it better." It might actually be worse?

"Oh don't be such a prude," Jim says. "I assure you I didn't use it. Why would I need to when I can make you lie as still as I want? It's purely for strategic purposes."

"And what is the strategy, exactly?"

As if on some invisible cue, Jim snaps to attention and jumps to his feet. "Show time," he says with jazz hands. 

Sebastian doesn't move from his spot, since Jim hasn't instructed him to. He's rewarded with an actual pat on the head like he's a dog, and then the creepy feeling of Jim stuffing something into his ear canal.

"Testing," Jim warbles, and it comes in loud and clear in his ear. "Now, you stay put and keep your eyes on yourself."

Nearly an hour passes, and Sebastian doesn't see Jim anywhere within his line of sight, which means he's preparing some other part of the plan somewhere else. It prickles at Sebastian, not being able to watch his back. His voice cuts back in eventually, and hearing it in his right ear almost makes him turn his head, even though he logically knows he isn't in the room.

"In case you haven't figured it out already, and I see no reason to assume with your inferior intellect that you have, it's a trap for our dear Sherlock Holmes," Jim says without preamble.

Fucking hell.

"You don't need to know the details that have led us here, but the rest of the plan is easy enough to follow. Sherlock, after having spent more time than a quote unquote 'genius' should thinking that's you in that room, will figure out that it is in fact not actually you, but the all-consuming need to investigate will bring him into that room regardless, whereupon you'll shoot him in the head."

Sebastian clears his throat.

"What?"

"May I ask a question?"

"You can try it and see what happens," Jim says, and it's not a good time to push because Jim has him set up to pull a trigger and he is no longer Sebastian Moran in this moment, he is merely an instrument of Moriarty's will, but he needs to know.

"Why would Sherlock Holmes even be looking for me at all?"

Against all expectations, Jim begins to laugh. Not just his showy, sinister villain laugh. A proper belly laugh, one that intensifies until it sounds like he's slapping his knee. 

"...Jim?"

Jim makes him wait out his laughing fit before he gets his answer. "Oh, my darling, darling husband, I'm sorry to have to admit I haven't been honest with you," he begins.

"Shocking," Sebastian says drily.

"In fact, I've been quite naughty. Remember how Jim Moriarty is technically dead? I burned that name very thoroughly. Too thoroughly, in fact. Everybody believed it, even the people I needed to continue doing business with. It was quite inconvenient. And of course you remember how you were injured, discharged, and dropped off the face of the earth for a few months."

'Remember' is really too laughably mild of a word to describe the way Sebastian doubts he will ever forget the feeling of being in suspended animation, unsure of where and when and what he was, with nothing to keep him company but the constant agony. Phantom pains still grip the insides of his thigh sometimes, deep where nothing can reach. He grunts at Jim.

"Well, I might have made a cheeky little impulse decision back then."

Bullshit, of course. Jim has never done anything he hasn't planned out ten steps in advance. 

"I maaaaaaay have taken your identity and started working as Sebastian Moran instead. I established you as my second in command and heir to the throne after my unfortunate demise. You've been making quite the name for yourself across the underworld, my dear heart. Unfortunately, no glory goes unnoticed by the intrepid Holmes brothers, which is where we find ourselves today."

"So you're saying I'm being hunted down by Sherlock Holmes because he thinks that I've been behind everything you've done for the past year."

"Precisely. Well summarized. Wonderful job."

"You little shit. So all those times people called you 'Mr. Moran' and you said you were using your married name?"

"I was using your full name."

"And now?"

"And now the jig is up."

Sebastian shifts his weight so that he doesn't lose circulation to his legs. He still has the sex doll replica of himself in his sights. It's still weird. "Would you care to elaborate?"

"The jig. Is up." Jim's tone is nothing like anything Sebastian has heard before, and he has carefully categorised each one of Jim's identifiable inflections out of sheer survival instinct. He can never quite tell if Jim is faking any of them, of course, but at least he can spot what Jim intends for him to interpret. This tone, however, is as loaded as silence. One could read anything at all into it, because it's empty at the core. His voice sounds like the flat finality of death. 

"Repetition isn't elaboration," Sebastian says, like he has a death wish.

"Sherlock got too close. He found you. Now he's coming to put you behind bars, but his fat brother will want to keep you in a special sort of prison, if his common little pet doctor doesn't summarily execute you without a trial first. He's almost as fond of the trigger as you, if you can imagine. A worse shot, though. It's a shame you're making me choose between you and Sherlock, it really is. I like him more, but you know how old-fashioned I am about spousal loyalty."

"Jim..."

"I expect I'll be unspeakably cruel to you for the next few weeks at least, to make up for it. I hope you'll find being alive worth the price. You might end up wishing I'd let him take you after all."

"I like it when you're cruel to me," Sebastian says, his throat rough and dry.

"That's why I keep you around. Look alive, our protagonist is taking the stage."

And right on time, Sherlock Holmes walks into the room. Through the scope, Sebastian can see his mouth moving, and then stopping short when he realises that the Sebastian on the chair is in fact a masturbation aide. He hasn't cottoned on yet that his head is in full view of the window. 

"Take the shot," Jim commands, and his voice is steel again, not the flat empty thing from earlier.

Sebastian doesn't.

"What are you doing," Jim hisses.

"I can't," Sebastian says, which isn't strictly true because he wants to, he really wants to. That smug bastard takes up more of Jim's attention than Sebastian could ever hope to, and he resents him more than he can even express. But Jim likes playing with him.

"If you don't take the shot right now, I will flay you alive and use your skin to make a kimono, which I will wear while smoking the finest Cuban cigars and stubbing them out on your raw, oozing flesh," Jim rails at him.

In the window in the other building, Sherlock suddenly freezes and smiles. He looks across the way and his eyes travel unerringly up, up, until he's looking directly into Sebastian's scope. There's no way he can see him through the tinted glass, but he makes what feels like eye contact with Sebastian, and his smile turns into a smirk.

"Fuck. He's made me."

" _Well then shoot him_!"

Sherlock, predictably, chooses that moment to duck behind some furniture, staying low as he bobs and weaves his way out of the door. 

"He's on the move, boss."

"Then why are you still in position? Get the hell out of that room. He's coming for you. Make yourself scarce."

Sebastian begins packing up without a word. He knows his heart should be pounding because he's as good as a dead man. He might be able to evade the Holmes brothers, but Jim he'll go home to, and Jim is going to fucking murder him. But he feels calm with the certainty that he's made the correct choice.

"You have ten minutes to get yourself to rendezvous point 7. Wait for me there. I'm cutting our comm link," Jim says.

"How are you going to buy me ten minutes?"

"I," Jim declares magnanimously, "am going to show our pal Sherlock that rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. And then I am going to take out of your sorry hide every unsolicited question you've asked me today. And after that, if you survive, we'll start on your punishment for your act of insubordination."

Sebastian knows that Jim keeps whips in the bunker at rendezvous point 7.

"Now, I really am cutting the comms. Daddy has work to do." His voice leaves Sebastian's ear in a sharp crackle of static.

Sebastian licks his lips and hurriedly makes his way towards his fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Endless thanks to Junkshop_Disco for her tireless dedication to our friendship, because she isn't even a Mormor shipper and she still Brit-picked and beta-read this whole thing without a word of complaint. She also put up with text messages such as (and I quote) "WORST QUESTION EVER: do you say balls for testicles Britain?" and later "Do British people say 'jizz'?" at all hours of the night.
> 
> Thanks also to C. for looking up random info and keeping me on track, although ACTUALLY I OWE YOU NOTHING SINCE I WROTE THIS WHOLE FIC FOR YOU.
> 
> Finally, thank you very much to you for reading. <3

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr [here](http://riseagainphoenix.tumblr.com) but it's more of a personal/political blog than a fandom one. I welcome questions/comments/feedback/headcanons/tribute poems, though, and can often be tricked into writing ficlets.


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